Hi,

A problem I have been coming up against is that a lot of the newer, budget Windows laptop (which I will immediately replace with my distribution of choice upon receipt) have memory soldered on the motherboard. This is a decision which brings the utmost distate to my mouth; I’m looking for budget laptops around the $300 mark (new) that let me upgrade their parts. Which models should I be looking at?

I am aware that the used market is fairly decent right now but I’d like to take a look at what’s coming up alongside looking at used gear. Thanks.

  • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
    21·
    9 months ago

    The last thing you should be worrying about when buying a budget laptop is the expandability of the ram. it seriously doesn’t matter if you only have 4gb, Linux is so lightweight it runs completely fine.

    imo you should be worrying about:

    • display quality (even some ips displays look horrible)
    • build quality (physically feel the keyboard, chassis flex, etc)
    • battery life (for heavily used laptops account for the price of a replacement. for old thinkpads you can extend it dramatically with bigger bstteries)
    • cpu speed (core count, single core performance, hyperthreading, etc. new celerons lose to i5s from 2013 lmao)
    • storage (MAKE SURE IT’S NOT EMMC!!)